


Cocoon

by NeverwinterThistle



Category: Annihilation (2018 Garland)
Genre: Body Horror, F/F, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-22 07:25:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17055674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverwinterThistle/pseuds/NeverwinterThistle
Summary: Surrounded by liars and tricks of the light, Anya looks for somethingreal.





	Cocoon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [merryghoul](https://archiveofourown.org/users/merryghoul/gifts).



The skin on Anya’s hands ripples like the water in the wake of their canoes. She clenches her fists around the handle of her paddle, and wills them to stay as still as the dead wood that blisters them.

It’s a trick of the light, of course. Trick of the trees, the surrounding swampland, the colours that shift and shimmer just under the surface of the water. Algae or something; Anya’s no botanist. She doesn’t understand why Lena got so obsessive over a patch of flowers, or where the fuck a giant albino gator came from, or why, when she peers over the side of the canoe, she can’t find her reflection in the ripples.

She’s out of her depth in these waters. She’s not too proud: she admits it. And having admitted it, she pushes it all to one side and goes back to doing her job.

“Hey,” she says. “You doing okay? No, don’t look at me, you’ll run us into the bank. Stay focused.”

“Sorry.” Josie sits at her paddle, her spine as straight as the trunks of the swamp trees they glide past; she’s uncomfortable, and too tense to fake it. Not happy with having to sit by Ventress, asleep or not. Not happy with all the water around and underneath them. Probably wondering if the next stroke of her paddle will strike solid, scaled mass, breaching the surface to pull her right back under.

She’s too young for the mission. Too good for the crew. Too sweet for Anya, definitely, but no one else is trying to reach her right now, and it’s obvious she needs to be reached for.

“You still got the shakes?” Anya nods towards Josie’s hands, which trembled so badly after the gator attack she could barely sling a pack over her shoulder.

“No, I’m okay now. I think you made it stop.”

No medical course Anya’s ever taken has suggested holding someone’s hands while they quiver, blowing on the clammy skin ( _but the fucker dragged her into the water, poor thing, it tried to eat her, no wonder she’s shaky, she’s too young for this. Someone give her a hug or something. Someone hold her until she feels a little more alive_ ). Anya’s having to improvise in this uncharted terrain. She’ll do what feels right, and to hell with the look Ventress gives her. It worked. That’s what counts.

“You just let me know if it starts up again,” Anya says. She’s happy with how brisk it sounds, how controlled. Not at all how she feels. “And when we stop for the night I’ll have a look at where the gator grabbed you. Get some antiseptic on there, maybe some bandages.”

“It’s just bruises,” Josie says. “But if you want to check…I guess you can do that. Just you, though.”

“Yeah, of course. Don’t need a whole crowd to diagnose bruises.”

Josie smiles, shy. “No.”

Under Josie’s sleeves, scar tissue winds like ivy up her delicate forearms. Anya’s seen. Anya knows, and so do the others, but Anya’s the one who did the preliminary medical checkups, and Anya’s seen the expression on Josie’s face when she shows off her war wounds. She usually hides them, of course. But she can’t hide her own lack of shame, or how reverently she runs her fingertips over them. She will not promise not to do it again.

Anya gets it. You can’t make someone change until they’re ready to accept it and take the steps to change themselves. She’s been there, or at least in the same neighbourhood. She thinks Josie likes that about her.

There is a creak, a muffled thud, something solid against her paddle. Anya jolts back instinctively, but there’s no attack this time. Just the river bank, closer than she thought it was. That’s her fault. Should have paid more attention.

“Stay focused,” Josie says up ahead, and turns just far enough in the canoe to throw Anya a smile. It’s uncondescending, sweet and without subterfuge. In this strange land of unending greenery, shimmering water, kaleidoscopic sunlight, it’s still the most beautiful thing Anya sees.

Josie looks away almost immediately. Anya does not.

 

* * *

 

There’s a man in the video recording. The skin of his abdomen hangs open like a loose wooden window shutter, and his intestines ripple like Anya’s palms ripple-

No.

No, that’s not how it goes.

There’s a man in the wall of the old swimming pool. He lies half in and half out, his torso vanishing into a round black void, and around him the moss erupts like a smoke cloud from a bomb, or the petals of a flower. Vines branch out from the poor man’s body. They split and split and expand until they start to encroach on the blue wall tiles. Each tendril sinks into the ceramic surface like it’s dirt. Like it’s growing.

The closer Anya gets, the more internal those vines look. At some point, she makes a mental switch, and from then on she thinks of them as _tendons_. After that, she refuses to go any closer.

It’s not real. She can’t be seeing this, this…medically, this makes no sense. The level of decomposition of that skull, jaw snapped wide in simulated scream, but the shoulders and chest look fresh and warm and pink and that is not fucking possible. So it’s just not real.

She didn’t sleep well last night; none of them did, and who can blame them? They’ll need to be careful about assigning people on watch shifts. Keep those shifts short, make sure everyone gets enough rest to function properly. Stay in good physical condition, because look what happens when you don’t.

_Look._

_Look at the man in the wall._

No. No, look at Josie, who turns away from him, maybe in fear, or sadness, or because it’s the most fucked up thing she’s ever seen in her entire life ( _she’ll have PTSD after this, poor thing, she’s a postgrad student with almost no social skills, she lives and breathes numbers and under her sleeves there are scars that climb her arms like vines, like tendons on a wall_ ). She sees something under the shallow, pink-tinged water. Grabs it; drops it.

The knife hits the water with a satisfying splash; Josie looks like she’s about to throw up. She begs to leave. She doesn’t want to be in this place. Nobody with a shred of human decency would make her stay.

Ventress does. Of fucking course.

Anya takes Josie’s hand, hauls her out of the deep, drained pool, and pulls her from the room. Out of the building, out into the garden, where the flowers look like a wedding and the lurid green grass almost hides the barbed wire from view.

“Please,” Josie says. She trembles like a leaf; she gasps for air like a woman on the verge of drowning. Anya makes her sit, takes the gun from her unresisting hands and sets it out of harm’s way, and then sits next to her. She has never felt this useless. Scraping motorbike crash victims off the road felt less futile than this.

“We have to stay,” she says. “I’m sorry. It is getting kind of late.” The clouds hang heavy and just a little too low in the sky. Night is falling too quickly. Anya peers out beyond the fence line at the abandoned land beyond, and tries not to shiver.

She very badly doesn’t want to be out there tonight.

“Can I sleep outside?” Josie asks. “Will she let me? I just don’t think I can be under a roof right now, I need…” She trails off. She doesn’t know what she needs. She pulls at the leaves of a nearby bush; it springs back when she releases it, cascading her in half-dead flower petals.

Anya doesn’t want to be anywhere near the outdoors once the sun sets. But that’s just fear talking. Lack of sleep, lack of trust, tricks of the light and the shadow. Her wants do not take precedence over Josie’s needs, even when Josie can’t articulate what those needs are.

Anya breathes in deep. The air smells of crushed flowers and human sweat. “We’ll see what we can do. I’ll tell Ventress we want to be by a window, or a door or something. Probably good to have escape routes. Or we can move after she’s asleep.”

“Thank you,” Josie says. “I know you don’t want to. I wish I could explain why I feel like we should be outside; it’s like this…urge. Like an instinct. I need the sky above me.”

“It’s fine.”

“Thank you.”

Eventually Josie’s shivering comes to a stop. Anya starts brushing her off, plucking fallen flower petals from her hair and clothes, pretending she’s in any way useful. They go back inside; Anya’s ready to pick a fight, ready to tear shreds from Ventress, who won’t give a shit because she never does. From Lena, who spends so much time inside her own head, and only occasionally seems to inhabit the same world as everyone else. From Cass, who stays so neutral.

This place is messing with all of them, and Anya’s scared that she’s the only one who can see it.

At some point in the evening, she goes back to the swimming pool. Drops down into the deep end, ignoring a disgusting spread of veined mould all over one wall, and fishes around in the cold, rank water. She finds the knife. It makes its way to the bottom of her pack.

Anya takes it with her when they leave; by then, Cass is already dead.

 

* * *

 

Lena’s getting increasingly secretive, squirrely; she was never all that forthcoming before, but now she spends every spare moment hunched over that microscope of hers, testing everything in sight. Flowers, grass, dirt, random pieces of plastic and metal from the buildings. Blood. She tests a lot of blood. Her own, and Ventress’; Anya stares her down when she asks for a sample, and intervenes when she turns to Josie. Lena will not have their blood. She will not break them down into quantifiable particles with neat little scientific names, and make illegible notes on how their essences move under her eerie, unblinking gaze-

_The skin on Anya’s palms writhes like a pit of entangled worms, her ropy lifeline squirming to get above the rest, smothered down and swallowed, and if her blood is the same then-_

Ventress sits in the watchtower with Cass’ bag between her knees, rummaging like a criminal through the things that are not hers. She finds the stuffed lion dangling from an outer zip; a last gift for a little girl with leukaemia who always loved lions and never lived long enough to see one. Anya knows the story. Ventress knows the story. And Ventress inspects the stuffed lion with a detachment that borders on psychopathic before tossing it aside like trash. Anya clenches her fists.

_Where her skin makes contact she can feel movement. Her fingertips feel soft, sticky; they meet the palms of her hands and start to liquefy, to blend, so that when she opens her hands they part reluctantly, strings of flesh stretching out like mozzarella on pizza-_

Josie stares at Anya. Anya stares back. They don’t need to talk, because these days half their communication is unspoken. It’s nice, most of the time. Special. The kind of bond Anya’s spent years seeking and letting slip away under the surface of a sea consisting mostly of ethanol and poor decisions. She’s late to this particular party. Not too sure what to do now she’s here.

But it doesn’t take a mind reader to work out what Josie’s trying to tell her this time. She’s scared out of her skin, and she wants to go home, and she is one hundred percent fucking right.

_Even in the damp, sweaty heat, Josie keeps the sleeves of her shirt pulled low over her wrists, and she will no longer let Anya see anything underneath. Her hands, though. Her hands are so dry. Anya’s slip and stick to things, wriggling away from her gun and her bag and any surface she makes contact with, like they’re repulsed. Josie’s hands are dry and smooth and oddly bumpy. Like bark. It doesn’t seem to bother her._

They’re losing their minds as Anya watches, and none of them see it but her. For some reason, she’s immune. Josie’s the next most normal, but even Josie can’t sleep without sedatives and Anya pressed up against her frail spine.

It’s fine. If they can just get out, Josie will heal. Anya will help her, and it’ll take a while but she has the staying power. Anya can fix her. If they can just get out, they’ll be fine.

But Ventress is going to the lighthouse, and Lena thinks the safest way to leave is to keep on going. Get to the coast, follow it to the perimeter wall. She invokes Cass Sheppard’s name. And Anya is not fucking stupid; she can see what’s going on, and she can see herself being played, because Lena and Ventress are far too similar, and Lena most definitely has an agenda she won’t tell them about.

She’s also a warm body with ( _functional_ ) hands that can use the gun she carries, and they’re going to need her; Josie flinches every time she has to pick hers up, and Anya-

_Feels the metal growing soft under her palms, starting to blend with her flesh, her muscles, her bones. She mingles with the things she touches. Feels them sink beneath the dermis and into her bloodstream; who knows what she is anymore. But she touches the gun and she touches the knife at the bottom of her bag, and after a couple of seconds she feels them growing warm. They touch her back. They know her._

Anya is starting not to trust her own aim. Exhaustion is the problem. Stress, psychological pressures. Tricks of the light, distracting her, making her shaky.

She needs to get out of here before the madness catches her. It’s already gnawing away at Ventress and Lena and-

“Do you think it’s true?” Josie asks. She’s slowly repacking her bag, reluctant to get moving, stalling to avoid another confrontation. “Is the coast the way out?”

Anya doesn’t know. She can’t admit that out loud. “Cass said it was.”

“I remember.”

“But Cass didn’t know any better than we do,” Anya objects. It feels like sacrilege to say it, but it’s true. And sometimes truth is a hard pill to swallow, but you have to take your medication. Only way to get better.

“Then maybe it doesn’t matter.” Josie zips up her bag, eyes to the ground. She doesn’t look up as she reaches across the floor, finding the little stuffed lion where Ventress tossed it. Cradling it in her hands. “We don’t remember how we got into the Shimmer in the first place. Most of my equipment isn’t working, so I’m not sure I can keep us going in the right direction. But we know where the coast is.”

“Yeah. It’s by Ventress’ fucking lighthouse.”

“We don’t have to go in.” Josie fumbles with the lion, the metal catch sliding through her fingers. She wants it on her bag. She can’t seem to make her fingers work the metal.

But Anya has sticky hands that cling well to metal, and she knows how to make it work for her. She kneels at Josie’s side, snatching the toy. Forcing the catch open before it can start to wriggle, and hooking it through one of the zippers on Josie’s bag. It looks good there. It looks _right_. Cass would have liked that.

Cass would also have wanted them to survive. Anya thinks about the knife in her bag. It’s her only weapon; the only secret she’s keeping. The others don’t know, so they can’t make it a part of their madness. She’s starting to think it might be the way out.

“Are you okay?” Josie is watching her. Big brown eyes, worry, warmth. Josie is nothing if not genuine.

“No,” Anya tells her. “None of us are, this is bullshit. But I guess it doesn’t matter. Lena and Ventress have spoken, and now _we_ get to fall in line. And I’m…angry, okay, I’m angry and scared-”

She’s not expecting Josie to kiss her. Not ready for it at all, and maybe Josie isn’t either; it’s so fast, the briefest press of her mouth on Anya’s, her lips cold and smooth and gone in the space of a second. She breathes out shakily. Her expression is exhilarated.

“We should get moving,” she says. “I’ll watch your back, if you…”

“Yeah.” Anya is finding it hard to breathe.

There is an odd, sharp taste on her lips. She licks them. They taste like the smell of pine trees. A little like flowers at a wedding.

As they head for the coast, the taste of Josie lingers.

 

* * *

 

The skin on Anya’s hands roils like an opaque cocoon covering an insect on hatching’s verge. Like there’s something alive underneath it; like the liquid shifting of a baby in an ultrasound. She presses those restless hands against her stomach.

Something is moving.

Ventress takes first watch this time. Lena waits until she can convince herself she’s the only one awake, and then she picks up her microscope and torch and leaves the room. Anya stops pretending to sleep.

She knows Lena lied about not wanting to go to the lighthouse. It’s definitely not the only thing Lena’s lying about; she gets so murky when she’s asked what she sees in that microscope. Pulls out the big words and abstract concepts, all with that distant, dazed expression like half her brain is somewhere else completely, and by the end of it Anya just throws her hands up and leaves the conversation. That feels intentional. Lena doesn’t want her to know what’s in the microscope. So she lies about it.

Maybe she lied about Cass. It’s been eating away at the back of Anya’s mind, and she wants to float her idea to Josie, but Josie isn’t a liar, and she can’t keep secrets. And it would hurt her. Holy shit, it would hurt her so bad.

Unless it wouldn’t. Maybe she already knows. Ventress sure does, and lately Josie’s started spouting…incomprehensible things, impossible things, crazy theories about plants with human DNA and something to do with refracted light. Josie’s caught the madness too. Maybe Lena’s let her in on whatever secret hides on those microscope slides she won’t let anyone else touch. Maybe Josie _is_ a liar.

Anya tries so hard not to think about it, but the question is a constant, more pressing even than _are we going to make it home?_ And _why are my fingerprints-_

Too many secrets. Anya keeps her mouth shut and her knife close. She sleeps with it under her pillow, when she sleeps at all; the handle has developed an almost magnetic attraction to her hands.

“Are you still awake?” Josie shifts under her sleeping bag, rolling over to look at Anya. She tugs the bedding up around her chin; even now, her arms are covered right up to the wrist. She was asking for gloves earlier in the day. Wouldn’t say why.

“Yeah.”

“Can’t sleep either, huh?”

“No,” Anya says. She doubts any of them are sleeping well these days. Too many slippery little secrets tucked away in treacherous minds. Guilty consciences. Fingerprints that quiver as Josie reaches out from her bedding to take one of Anya’s hands.

She’s too warm, too smooth, too…solid. Like touching a sunbathed tree in summer; Josie’s hands don’t writhe like worms, but her bones are too light. Anya taps her with one shivering fingertip.

She’s hollow.

“I know,” Josie whispers. “I’m not sure when it started, but it’s definitely spreading. It’s up to my shoulders now.”

“Does it hurt?” Anya bends Josie’s fingers this way and that, pressing them, finding them thin and overly flexible. Twig fingers. She wears wood under her skin.

“There’s no pain,” Josie says. “And it’s not so bad, I…I feel stronger sometimes. More resilient. It’s a change, but it’s not bad. What’s happening to you?” She’s so calm about it. All of it. She doesn’t sound even the slightest bit surprised; her daydreamer’s distance is eerie now. Otherworldly. Not quite as human as she should be.

_That’s the lack of sleep talking._

Anya doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t pull away when Josie leans over to kiss her again. This time is slower, her ineptitude more apparent, her teeth clashing on Anya’s until she’s shown how to soften her lips and angle her jaw, but even then her breath smells of pine trees.

_That’s your imagination._

“I’ve never done this with anyone,” Josie whispers. She’s a hinderance to Anya’s attempts at combining their sleeping bags and blankets, her hands trembling as she tries to help with the undressing. “I think this might be my last chance.”

“We’re going to be fine.”

“But I’m glad it’s with you.”

“We’re not like the rest, we’re going to make it.”

“I’m not sure that’s true anymore,” Josie says, but if she says anything else it’s muffled by her shirt as Anya drags it over her head and tosses it aside.

The scars on her wrists branch like ivy, raw and reopened, and in the places she cut deepest there are tiny green buds taking root. Swelling outwards, preparing to blossom. Edges of bone peep through her opened skin, bark-brown and fragile.

 _Trick of the light_.

The arms around Anya’s shoulders are spindly ( _but that’s just Josie, she’s always been like that_ ).  The skin of her chest, thighs, and legs is dimpled. Irregular. There are tens, hundreds of flower buds pushing up through her skin like new teeth, new growth in fertile soil ( _no there aren’t, it’s just some kind of eczema, an allergic reaction to a plant she brushed against_ ). The muscles of her upper arms are gradually starting to waste away; she’s all bone up there, and from her bones peer the beginnings of petals.

 _Just a nightmare_.

Anya fucks her as gently as she remembers how, which is not as gently as Josie deserves. She can’t bear to slip her squirming fingers into Josie’s sweetness and warmth, but her tongue is fine for the moment, and underneath her Josie sighs like wind through leaves. She touches Anya’s hair with tapered fingers. She starts to flower; some of the buds beneath her skin are slowly splitting, petals slick with strands of blood. It’s too dark for Anya to make out the colours. She can feel them, though. Her fingers know the shape they will become.

Her fingers move like the intestines of the man in the video, like Josie moves as Anya’s tongue laps her open and slips inside her. She tastes like the smell of spring flowers. Her sap smears on Anya’s lips.

_But this isn’t real. This is a lie. A lie is easy, but the truth is so much harder._

Josie is bird-boned, almost weightless where she lies in Anya’s arms. Her clothes once more conceal her skin and scars; it’s too cold to cuddle naked. She’s smiling. Every now and then, she nuzzles Anya’s collarbone. Too shy to kiss her properly. Too blissed to retreat back into her shell. It means so much to have her there. And Anya wants to believe in her. She really does. She wants it just as much as she wants her grip on reality back.

And she is so tired of being lied to.

Anya stretches slowly, trying not to disrupt Josie. She feels around under her bedding. Her palms itch. Her hands are incubating changes. Maybe the rest of her is too. She feels sick.

“What are you looking for?” Josie mumbles.

“The truth,” Anya says, kissing her forehead in apology.

Under a pillow, her fingers find the knife.


End file.
